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You need dangerous alien monsters that you can slaughter by hundreds without moral qualms or worrying about collapsing the ecology? A military experiment that went out of control could fit the bill, with either robots, cyborg beasts, or quickly breeding custom animals.

You want weird looking humanoids? Humans might follow all kinds of fashions when medical tech advances.
Most aliens in the stories are thinly veiled foreigners anyways.

You want real non-human intelligence? Uplifted animals.